Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to the field of the Internet technologies, and in particular, to systems, devices, and methods for acquiring, processing, and updating global information.
Description of the Related Art
With the rapid development of e-commerce globalization, cross-regional e-commerce transactions are becoming increasingly popular and frequent. A business deployed in a large-scale cross-regional distributed e-commerce environment often faces global information update demands. In order to provide continuous services, the update process must be efficient and data must be consistent.
Consider, as examples, IP address translation configuration data in a virtual private cloud (VPC) business or global information of international e-commerce platforms, such as eBay, Amazon, etc. By using a routing table, user data operations at a data center may be grouped geographically in the e-commerce trade process. To quickly respond to a user's data operation requests, and guarantee consistency of global information, international e-commerce platforms usually distribute a plurality of data centers in multiple regions. These platforms generally assign the nearest data centers to users based to the users' location and record these assignments in a routing table. Subsequently, a user's data operation requests are served based on the routing table (i.e., at an assigned data center). Thus the platforms are not only able to efficiently serve users in various regions, but are also able to guarantee that all data operations by the same user occur at the same data center.
In practice, however, users may perform cross-regional data operations. For example, users may travel to other cities or immigrate to other countries. To quickly respond to a user's data operation requests and guarantee global data consistency, the data centers, in which users belong to, need to be reassigned and the routing table needs to be updated.
Current techniques to update a routing table generally include the following steps. First, a management control system (MCS) of an e-commerce platform pushes an updated version of the routing table to the application servers in the various regions. Next, the application servers return update confirmation notices to the MCS after receiving the new version of the routing table and then suspend service of the users' data operation requests. The MCS then sends enabling instructions for the new routing table to the application servers after confirming that all the application servers in the various regions have received the new version of the routing table. Finally, the application servers restore normal services after receiving the enabling instructions, so that the application servers in the various areas can use the unified routing table to serve the users.
However, in a large-scale cross-regional routing table update scenario, because of service network abnormities, faults in the application servers, and other causes, some application servers may not receive the new version of the routing table. On one hand, the application servers missing the routing table update will continuously provide service via the old routing table after resuming normal work, causing the application servers to not utilize the unified routing table and resulting in inconsistencies in the global information. On the other hand, failed application servers may disappear from an update list in the MCS of the e-commerce platform. The update statuses of these application servers, which are not updated, cannot be sent to the MCS. Thus, the MCS cannot determine the update statuses of the routing table in use by the application servers from the update list. Therefore, accurate global synchronous status information cannot be guaranteed. In addition, global data inconsistency and inaccurate global synchronous status information may occur in the large-scale cross-regional update scenario.